for a while i hated how every new thing felt built on something that came before it. maybe it's because i'm a middle child. not quite sure.

now i realize that was a necessary reflex. more than anything it reminds me we're social creatures. we mimic, remix, and participate because we want to belong. trends give us that temporary sense of tribe.. something to talk about, to lubricate conversations, to feed our need for belonging.

but i've been thinking a lot about my discernment lately. in what i build, use, admire. and i've arrived at what separates the builders i respect the most. the people whose work feels inevitable, not derivative.

late last week i watched an interview that referenced something jony ive said about steve jobs:

"steve was obsessed with the nature and quality of his own thinking. he worked so hard at it, that it was elegant, disciplined. he was thinking of his own thinking."

all of us optimize for speed now (more than ever), not quality of thought. even though you can get a 100x result from a meta-prompt that clarifies your intention with a single query.. almost no one does. instead we rely on off-the-shelf system prompts and fire a single message.

it was my school that actually trained this muscle of analyzing my own thoughts and intentions early. and i feel particularly grateful right now. thank you wilmington friends school. it was just the right amount of discipline, introspection, and respect for the process of arriving at an idea.

in short.. how to think, not what to think.

i definitely took it for granted at the time. especially since we had to sit in silence every week for 45 minutes with a candle. try making a 6 year old do that.

but the more i craft, the clearer it gets. the founders i admire are the ones who explore their own nature.. how they think, how they can be of service. not chasing speed and opportunity.

wordsworth understood this. in "i wandered lonely as a cloud" he describes stumbling on a field of daffodils. the real gift wasn't the moment itself.. it was the memory. the way it returned to him later in solitude and filled him with something he didn't expect.

that's what good thinking does. it compounds in ways you can't predict.